Matilde Serao

Matilde Serao is widely regarded as the most successful Italian woman journalist of the nineteenth century as well as being an important writer of fiction. A great observer of life, Serao focused her writing directly on the most pressing problems of a newly unified Italy, urban poverty, and the North/South divide. Historian and critic Benedetto Croce said of her that she had an ""imagination that is limpid and alive""; Nobel Laureate Giosue Carducci called her the greatest woman writer in Italy; and Gabriele D'Annunzio dedicated a novel to her. This collection, the first to make Serao's short stories available in English translation, reflects this naturalistic writer's interest in the everyday drama of the lives of women in the Italy of her day. In Serao's spare and simple prose, the young women of turn-of-the-century Naples come to life, negotiating the details of school and work, church and marriage, in a world circumscribed by fathers and chaperones, fiances and bosses. Infused with the writer's deep sense of humanity, their quietly involving stories - at once so poetic and so ordinary - attest to the transformative power of literature, and to the promise that even the most humble life holds.

"Tells of life in turn-of-the-century Roman times. The novel's insights into the social and political temperaments of the times makes for involving reading." --The Bookwatch An indefatigable writer and the author of over 40 books, Matilde Serao (1857-1927) was arguably the most famous Italian woman journalist of the nineteenth century. The Conquest of Rome (1885), which tells the story of the arrival in Rome of a provincial deputy from the poor South, paints a brilliant portrait of political and social life in contemporary Rome. Upon his arrival in Rome, Frencesco Sangiorgio dreams of a glittering future there. Although the Eternal City greets the young man's ambition with indifference, he gradually makes his mark on his parliamentary colleagues, soon establishing a place in high society. His fate is sealed, however, when he falls under the sway of the enigmatic Angelica Vargas, and the conquest of Rome that seemed so tantalizingly close begins to slip away.